Onyx Storm (The Empyrean #3)

So Onyx Storm is the finale in The Empyran trilogy and whilst Iron Flame didn’t exactly amaze me with its qualities, it at least manages to close out the story before it overstays its welcome with Yarros’ stale writing style…Oh, wait a second, it ends on a cliffhanger, there’s two more books to come now to capitalise on the TikTok hype despite the author having had no plans for this story to last longer? Well then…

Onyx Storm is a catastrophe from beginning to end, it has every single one of the flaws of both its predecessors but has lot any of the fun factor that Fourth Wing presented. It got bad enough that I quite quickly gave up on reading the book and instead entirely relied on listening to the audiobook when I was walking or biking around. Even for the end sprint in the last 10 or so chapters I could not bring myself to read it and instead listened to it whilst half zoning out. The prime issue is that because this book wasn’t meant to happen since the story was planned out for 3 books, this is an entry that is obsessed with keeping the status quo and as such is filled with absolutely nothing of value. If you skipped this book you would be able to pick up book 4 (whenever that comes out) and be fine.

It’s an issue that isn’t even subtle as within the first few chapters Varish who stood as an antagonist between Xaden and Violet is immediately replaced by Atos who has the exact same motivations and poses the exact same empty threats. The venin are also held back by the newly restored wards but not really, they’re actually still pushing but not quite as much but the time pressure is still very much there. Xaden is also a venin now although he’s fighting against it and the entire book is about that and by the end, he’s still a venin who is still fighting against that. In the meantime we also get a repeat of Violet being jealous about Xaden’s ex but this time it’s Xaden being jealous of Violet’s ex. To top it all off, whilst the world is falling apart and Violet tries to save it, she also has to go to class like a regular student. It’s either comical or pathetic how hard Yarros forced her story into keeping a status quo.

The worst of it is that not once but twice does Yarros kill of main characters whose names I can actually remember for once – seriously everyone is either called Repunkelxer or Injiaxyn and not given any characterisation, we need some normal names once in a while if we’re meant to remember and care about this 20+ character cast – before changing her mind 3 lines later with a “oh no they’re alive actually”. Instead someone called Terendoxyn or something gets killed off and nobody cares because Terendoxyn wasn’t even a character before his death.

I’m not fine with filler books, I’m not even gonna pretend that “it’s ok because at least we get…” because it’s not and we get nothing in return for the filler anyway. The world is not even getting developed that much which would be the usual excuse of a filler fantasy book because every other has a world so big that it definitely needs to be longer than The Lord of the Rings. We do get thrown into a side quest of finding the irid, Andarna’s dragon species which involves a bunch of more main characters and some disposable cannon fodder flying between islands. Where are these islands? I don’t know. Does it matter? Not in the slightest. Not only is the side quest a waste of time with the irids doing the good old cliché of “we’re so wise and you’re so dumb so we won’t help because we’re so neutral” (and inevitably 3 chapters later, one of them comes around to help anyway, reignites the wards so they’re super duper strong now against venin but not entirely still and are still totally at risk of collapse if we don’t beat the venin in a certain amount of time). But every island is also a complete waste of time. They all have “a thing” in that each island is dedicated to a god and each island bases its entire culture and existence and rule of law around that one god. It’s trying to do Greek mythology I guess because Athens is dedicated to Athena but Greek religion was never this monochromatic. Instead here we get an island that values luck so they only accept people who play a luck based game with them and everyone gets a gift except for the one unlucky one who dies. It’s cartoonishly stupid. It also means that I have not remember any of the island names, instead I can only remember them as “this is the island of luck and this is the island of truth”, it’s childish, it’s a book written for literal children.

Except it’s not because whilst Violet and Xaden do not ever engage in any form of healthy relationship activity instead only ever angstily looking at each other and thirsting over each other’s bodies and having so much sex that I skipped entire chapters where the only content are 10 pages of clits, dicks, fucks, grunts and cums. I didn’t buy literal pornography so why are those chapters there. A 10 year old child could buy this book and nobody would stop them. However, outside of the sex craze, everything else is extraordinarily immature. Everything’s written like a Marvel movie with not a single serious situation being allowed because Riddock has to make jokes all the time because God forbid he cared about anything at all.

The catastrophe really strikes with that lack of caring, if everyone with a real personality gets plot armour, the characters don’t take anything seriously, the story doesn’t go anywhere, the world isn’t being developed, the jokes fall flat, the romance is absent and the porn isn’t what I read books for anyway then I cannot ignore any of the issues these books have been plagued with since book 1. For one I’m convinced that no editor nor publisher ever looked at any of these books. Yarros is what I’ll call a batch writer, meaning she’ll write chapters 22, 23, 24 and 25 back to back and then never revisits them. Several times I have caught specific sentences or odd words being repeated ad nauseam within 3 to 4 chapters and then never reappearing again. The two most egregious ones were “my heart beats”, “my heart thunders”, “my heart sounds like hoofbeats” back to back to back within 2 pages and people dying being described as “desiccating” for 1 chapter and then never again without having been something that happened before either. A publisher, an editor, a proofreader, an author that actually didn’t ship their first draft would have caught this and the fact that it didn’t, to me, is proof that nobody actually cares, it could be AI generated and shipped off and I don’t think anyone would have stopped it from happening.

We also get a couple of completely nonsensical sentences like “No sword. No staff. She’s unarmed with the exception of a row of blades at her hip”. In other words “she’s unarmed except for the several daggers” so by definition not unarmed. Why is it always daggers by the way? Everyone is always using daggers but that’s not a main combat weapon, why does nobody ever use a sword, a spear or a bow and arrow? Speaking of daggers, alloy hilted daggers, i.e. daggers whose hilts are made of alloy, why do they kill Venin? I’m not asking why are Venins lethally allergic to alloy, that’s a fantasy rule I’m fine with, I’m asking why the hilt and not the blade is made of alloy, I mean you don’t stab with the hilt… Whilst we’re on the illogical why are they breeding sheep to feed dragons? Sheep are neither the fast reproducers nor the most efficient meat yield of the farming animals. Did Yarros just watch How to train your dragon and make the choice that sheep were the universal dragon feeder?

Anyway, character descriptions have also reached their breaking point with me. This goes back to most characters being given a name and nothing else to characterise them which makes it difficult to remember them on top of having stupidly overcomplicated names. Instead of characterisation Yarros spends more time describing what each characters is wearing and how broody they are to a level of detail that is both completely forgettable and way too deep. I highlighted this part during my reading “and though I hate his scowl, I have to admit, the glasses really work for him”. I have no idea who this refers to, scowling isn’t a personality trait nor a memorable physical trait (plus 75% of the cast is scowling, smirking and/or brooding). That’s a recurring issue, compounded by Yarros once again adding too many overly detailed small actions to narration that act as padding rather than personality building like “I tug the perpetually slipping strap of my Deverelli silk nightdress back up my shoulder”. This sentence is way too long and too detailed, instead something like “I pull the strap of my nightdress back up.” would do the job better. We know the strap is on the shoulder, we don’t need to know it’s silk, that it’s from Deverelli is irrelevant, the fact that it’s perpetually slipping doesn’t matter. A similar example are lengthy descriptions of exactly what sort of hairstyle Violet might tie her into, how much time it takes her, how often she does it, what hairclip she uses and so on. It’s so frequent and adds so much padding I’m sure you could shave of 10% of the book’s length just by doing the bare minimum of an editor’s job.

Finally a quick note on the audiobook since I spent so long with it rather than the written text. Violet’s voice actress is passable as always, but this time there are 3 more voice actors in the last couple chapters as for some reason the narration point of view jumps seemingly randomly between characters. I’ve never liked the Xaden chapter closing out the previous two books. In my view, if you spend every single chapter with 1 character then there’s no reason to just change POV for the final chapter if you don’t intend to sticking with it, so doing it with 3 different characters this time is even worse. Especially so since once again there’s virtually no difference in writing style, Violet, Xaden, Rhiannon and Imogen all think and narrate in the same style, Yarros didn’t try adapting anything. It’s just an excuse for her to lead us through Quinn’s death who is…someone that I might have cared about if I knew anything about her outside of her name and signet. It isn’t helped by the fact that Imogen’s voice actress is just cashing in a check, I’ve heard more convincing grief voice acting in high school productions.

So Onyx Storm is just plain bad. Although you could argue that it’s not particularly worse than its predecessors, it sports all of the same flaws but with the loss of any fun factor because of an unnecessary padding to 5 books, I also lost any reason to enjoy my time with it. And you can call me prude if you want but since Tik Tok is a mostly children’s and young teen’s network, I’m not sure that advertising something that’s leaning so heavily into full on explicit sex scenes is really morally acceptable.